Political editor of The Age

Julia Gillard ... will be feeling a little better than Tony Abbott. Photo: David Foote

THIS will be a bruising parliamentary week, the last of an extraordinary and draining year that has strained voters' tolerance of politicians to the max.

As they contemplate the next few days, full of Christmas-party cheer and political poison, Julia Gillard will be feeling a little better than Tony Abbott, even though she knows she'll face a battering on the AWU slush fund affair.

In Abbott's one-time dreams, the Labor government would have collapsed by now, an election been held, and he'd be PM. Instead, the government is still standing. Not only that, but since mid-year, Labor's primary vote has improved and the two party gap narrowed.

Abbott's personal ratings have fallen. In the Nielsen poll, Gillard's approval has risen from 35 per cent in May to 47 per cent in November; Abbott's has fallen from 44 per cent to 36 per cent. Gillard has managed to blacken her opponent's character.

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The government this week will bring into Parliament legislation on the Gonski education reforms and the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Its message will be: we are talking about positives, and will be doing that next year too.

The disability bill will establish the scheme's framework and the agency to operate its first stage. The education legislation is both aspirational and practical, containing the goal of having Australia among the top five international performers by 2025 in reading, maths and science, as well as the bones of the new funding model.

The government hopes that this news will be more to the public's taste than arguments about what Gillard might have known or done when a Slater & Gordon lawyer.

The AWU affair - which involved Gillard's then boyfriend who allegedly stole from a union slush fund on which Gillard had done legal work - has been difficult for the PM. She thought she'd put it to bed with her marathon news conference in August, but new questions are being asked.

There has so far been no smoking gun in the mass of claims and counter claims. But for the opposition, a lot of smoke is all that is needed.

In the absence of something sensational, will these attacks do Gillard continued harm?

A bit, no doubt. But mainly they will reinforce the negative opinions of those who already have no time for her. For these people, they'll feed that perception that ''she can't be trusted''.

Some swinging voters, however, are likely to switch off a story that is incredibly complex to follow.

The end of the parliamentary year, dubbed the ''killing season'', can be a risky time for leaders. It might have been so for Gillard. Kevin Rudd's supporters tried to stir, but Gillard has been able to draw those rising polls around her like a protective blanket. Whether anything changes next year is another matter, but it is hard to see it, without an unexpected catastrophe.

In between the talk of high aspiration and low scandal, both leaders will have a minority of discontented backbenchers muttering about their asylum seeker policy, following their latest harsh proposals. Government and Coalition both want the voters to get the message: we're tough. So far, it hasn't got through to the people smugglers and their passengers.

The federal political year won't be quite over when the politicians exit Canberra at week's end, but it will be on a sharp downhill run to a short respite before the real make or break contest.